Hobbyist blog about all things software. Any correspondence of this blog's name to names of individuals, organizations, companies, products or other blogs is pure coincidence.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Screencast showing pycdep usage.

Pycdep looks interesting, but I have no idea how to use it?!

I feel your pain. The usage of mixed languages (python which examines C++ and generates prolog?!) seems a bit daunting at first sight. Let me assure you it is not (of course I would say that :D ).

To prove that you can get some info about your source code without knowing anything about python or prolog, I have made a screencast in which I run pycdep on a C++ program STAF

Some things covered in the screencast:
- running pycdep to generate the prolog database
- examining the logfile for potential problems
- taking a look at the generated prolog file (what kinds of facts does it contain?)
- running prolog queries
- using the natural language interface (experimental)
- saving results of queries to a file

Hope this is interesting to some of you. Note that you may want to watch it on youtubeas it appears wider there, and the fonts are better readable there. To watch the video on YouTube, click the YouTube icon in the bar just underneath the video image or follow this link.

Some technical details: the screencast was made using recordmydesktop on a linux debian unstable desktop. The fonts on the terminal and inside vim were increased to size 18 to have a readable end result. The resulting .ogv file was then transcoded to mpeg2 using ffmpeg (since youtube doesn't support .ogg file format anymore :( ). The end result was a file that was 10 times bigger than the .ogv file (I guess next time I should select a lower bit rate.)